Melt your fat with the Skinny Patch!

Want to get rid of that stubborn fat? Loath your love handles? (They should really be called hate handles to be honest). Tired of people telling you the solution is just to exercise and eat right? Cause like, who has time for that? Also, pasta is delicious.

Well, have I got news for you! Scientists have developed a skin patch to melt away your unwanted fat! And by “developed” I mean tested in mice with favourable results, so don’t cancel your gym membership just yet.

This medicated patch has been able to transform unwanted white fat into brown fat in obese mice. Why is this good? Well, brown fat is easier to break down.

We have two different types of fat in our bodies: white fat and brown fat. While white fat is hard to get rid of, brown fat can be burned to produce heat when it’s cold (it’s what you’re mainly using as fuel when you shiver).

Babies have a lot of brown fat to protect them from cold weather. So when you lose your “baby fat” as you grow, you’re mainly losing brown fat. Which probably seemed much easier to shift at the time than those 5 kilos you accidentally put on when you were stress eating before exams.

Ok, so why haven’t we already solved obesity by transforming white fat to brown fat and throwing someone in a freezer for a bit so they can shiver off the kilos? Well a) that’s probably not super ethical…or necessarily effective, and b) the few treatments that already exist are pretty invasive and have some nasty side effects. This new patch however, seems to avoid these issues.

The patch delivers the drug in nanoparticles from lots of tiny needles. It’s a relatively painless process, like sticking a bit of velcro on your skin. The nanoparticles contain the drug as it’s delivered, and then gradually disintegrate. This allows the drug to be released in a more “sustained way” to directly target local fat tissue, instead of spreading quickly throughout the body as it would with a normal injection.

The study showed that the mice who received these drug patches had a 20 percent decrease in fat on the side of their bodies where the patch was applied. Their blood glucose levels were also lower than the obese mice that hadn’t received the patches. The patches also improved the metabolism of mice that weren’t obese.

The researchers are hoping that these nifty little patches could be used in the future as a safe and effective way to treat obesity and metabolic disorders like diabetes. It also has potential as a less invasive alternative to liposuction.

Ok cool, sounds great. Give me a hundred of these and let me stick them all over myself! Except the patch hasn’t been tested in humans yet, so we’ll need to wait for that. For now, I think our best bet for shedding those few unwanted kilos is exercise, combined with healthy and balanced diet.

But, if the patch is developed for humans, would you try it? Let me know your thoughts below!